White Women Voted Trump. Now What?

By Phoebe Lett

Nov. 10, 2016

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Trump supporters at a rally in Mobile, Ala., in August.CreditJeff Haller for The New York Times

Around the country women weep, wondering how the glass ceiling still stands. But now is not the time to bury our faces in our hands. For white women in particular, now is the time to look in the mirror.

Ninety-four percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton. Sixty-eight percent of Latina women did so. But 53 percent of the white female voters in this country voted for Donald Trump.

As a young white woman, I realize that white women did not do the work needed to keep Mr. Trump, and his boasts about sexual harassment, from the White House. They did not rise to the uncomfortable challenge of convincing other white women to support not just their own interests, but those of women and men of color, L.G.B.T. Americans, immigrants and people in poverty.

The problem may lie in myopia: On Tuesday, women honored suffragists by placing their “I voted” stickers on Susan B. Anthony’s tombstone. How many remembered that the suffrage movement put white women first, and failed to fight for women of color?

Whatever the cause, the white women of the “pantsuit nation,” as many Clinton supporters call themselves, have some work to do.

When men, awakening to the privileges their gender grants them in society, ask for a place in the feminist movement, feminists ask them to call out sexism when they see it and help other men understand what they have learned about misogyny.

It is time white women start making change within their own circles. White women must talk to their sisters, mothers, colleagues and friends about racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia and ableism. Prejudice must be called out, even in friends. These conversations may become uncomfortable, but so are these election results: 42 percent of American women voted for Trump. Ignore the calls to avoid politics at the dinner table, knowing that many Americans do not have the luxury of avoiding identity politics, because they live it every day.

We must all try to live by the words of the civil rights activist and writer Audre Lorde: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”